Chapter 3 - The Picture She Kept
The caseworker's office was too bright to hide anything. Late morning light came straight through the big windows of the children's home and fell across a cheap laminate table, and I could see every scratch in it.
She'd closed the door after the woman with the folder told me, "Mr. Vitari, please come with me." The girl was not in the room. She was in the playroom next door. I could see her through the narrow window in the door. She sat at a little table in that red lace dress, the big satin bow still fixed on the right side of her head, her hands flat on the table like she was trying not to fidget. Someone had given her crayons. She wasn't drawing.
The caseworker slid a manila folder toward me and I didn't touch it right away. My hands were not steady and I didn't want her to see that.
"Before we go further I need you to look at what she came in with," she said. She was older, maybe fifty, careful in the way she moved papers. "We inventory everything. It's important you identify accurately."
She opened the folder. Inside there was a Ziploc bag with two things.
The first was a photograph. It was creased from being folded and unfolded, soft at the edges. It was me. Younger. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. My hair was shorter then, not slicked back, and I had no beard. I was in a white t-shirt in front of the apartment I rented over the garage on 5th Street, squinting into the sun. I remembered who took it.
Elena.
I hadn't said her name out loud in seven years.
"Do you know her?" the caseworker asked.
I nodded once. My throat was dry. "Elena Ruiz."
She waited.
"We were together," I said. "Seven, almost eight years ago. I was twenty-four. She was twenty-two. We lived together about a year in my apartment. Then she left."
The caseworker wrote that down without looking up. "Did she tell you where she was going?"
"No. She just packed while I was at work. Left a note on the counter. Said she couldn't do this anymore. That was it. No call. I went by her sister's place a couple times. They said she moved out of state."
I could still see the note from that day too. One line in blue pen. Different handwriting than what was in the bag now, but the same hand.
The second thing in the bag was a smaller piece of paper, folded twice. Lined paper torn from a notebook. The caseworker unfolded it with gloves and laid it flat.
It was Elena's handwriting. Messier now, hurried.
*This is Mia. If anything happens to me, her daddy is Marco Vitari. He didn't know about her. Please tell him I'm sorry. - E*
Mia.
The girl in the red dress in the other room had a name now and it hit me harder than the photo.
The caseworker let me read it twice. She didn't rush me.
"Her name is Mia Ruiz," she said quietly. "She just turned seven last month. September fourteenth."
I did the math before she finished the sentence. I couldn't help it. I stared at the little window where Mia sat with the bow in her hair, and my mind ran backward.
Elena left in late January. I remembered because it was right after New Year's and we'd had a fight about rent and about my work hours at the shop. She'd been sick that whole last month. Throwing up in the morning. I thought it was stress. She said it was a stomach bug and wouldn't let me make her a doctor appointment. She was distant. Crying a lot. I thought she was unhappy with me.
If Mia was seven and her birthday was September fourteenth, that meant she was conceived in December. Late December.
Our last months together. Right before Elena left without an explanation.
I felt my hands go cold.
"I didn't know," I said. I looked at the caseworker. "I swear to you I didn't know she was pregnant. She never told me. If I had known—"
She held up a hand, not unkind. "Mr. Vitari, I need you to be precise for the record. You had a sexual relationship with Elena Ruiz that ended in January approximately eight years ago?"
"Yes."
"And you had no knowledge of a pregnancy or a child until today when she called you Daddy?"
"Yes. I didn't know." My voice was low. I had to clear it. "How do you know me? That's what I asked her. And she said... she said her mom showed her my picture. That one." I nodded at the creased photo. "That's the only picture she had."
The caseworker slipped both items back into the bag. "We have not been able to locate Ms. Ruiz. Mia was left with a neighbor three weeks ago with a suitcase and that bag. The neighbor called us when Ms. Ruiz didn't come back. There's no current address or phone."
Through the window Mia looked up. She saw me looking. That small mark above her left eyebrow was clear in the daylight. She gave a little wave, hesitant, and I lifted my hand before I realized it.
The caseworker followed my eyes.
"Mr. Vitari, do you want to request a birth certificate search?" she asked. "If you're listed, or if we can establish paternity, that changes her placement options. But I have to tell you that search takes time. County vital records, and if she was born elsewhere—"
"Request it," I said. The words came out fast. "Please. Whatever you need from me. I want to see it. I want to know if I'm on it."
She pulled a form from the folder and turned it toward me. "I'll file today for a certified copy from the state. We'll also need you to consent to DNA testing if you want to pursue kinship. Are you willing?"
I picked up the pen. My neck tattoo pulled when I swallowed.
May you like
"Yes," I said. "Wherever you need me to sign."
Mia had gone back to staring at her crayons. The red bow hadn't moved. It sat perfect against her dark curls, and I couldn't stop thinking about Elena folding that photo up small enough to fit in a child's suitcase and telling her, this is your daddy.
